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Why is everything so scalable?

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Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#271

Post by immibis »

sgarland wrote: post #47
BirAdam wrote: post #29

Just to be honest for a bit here... we also should be asking what kind of scale? Quite a while ago, before containers were a thing at all, I did systems for some very large porn companies. They were doing streaming video at scale before most, and the only other people working on video at that scale were Youtube. The general setup for the largest players in that space was haproxy in front of nginx in front of several…

THANK YOU. People look at me like I’m insane when I tell them that their overly-complicated pipeline could be easily handled by a couple of beefy servers. Or at best, they’ll argue that “this way, they don’t have to manage infrastructure.” Except you do - you absolutely do. It’s just been partially abstracted away, and some parts like OS maintenance are handled (not that that was ever the difficult part of managing s…

You can get a server now with, like, five hundred cores and a fifty terabytes of RAM. It's expensive, but you can get one.

A used server with sixty cores and one terabyte of RAM is a lot cheaper. Couple thousand bucks. I mean, that's a lot of bucks, but a terabyte for only four digits?

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#272

Post by immibis »

sgarland wrote: post #47
BirAdam wrote: post #29

Just to be honest for a bit here... we also should be asking what kind of scale? Quite a while ago, before containers were a thing at all, I did systems for some very large porn companies. They were doing streaming video at scale before most, and the only other people working on video at that scale were Youtube. The general setup for the largest players in that space was haproxy in front of nginx in front of several…

THANK YOU. People look at me like I’m insane when I tell them that their overly-complicated pipeline could be easily handled by a couple of beefy servers. Or at best, they’ll argue that “this way, they don’t have to manage infrastructure.” Except you do - you absolutely do. It’s just been partially abstracted away, and some parts like OS maintenance are handled (not that that was ever the difficult part of managing s…

You can get a server now with, like, five hundred cores and a fifty terabytes of RAM. It's expensive, but you can get one.

A used server with sixty cores and one terabyte of RAM is a lot cheaper. Couple thousand bucks. I mean, that's still a lot of bucks, but a terabyte for only four digits?

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#273

Post by worldsayshi »

JackSlateur wrote: post #193
jwr wrote: post #5

I don't get this scalability craze either. Computers are stupid fast these days and unless you are doing something silly, it's difficult to run into CPU speed limitations. I've been running a SaaS for 10 years now. Initially on a single server, after a couple of years moved to a distributed database (RethinkDB) and a 3-server setup, not for "scalability" but to get redundancy and prevent data loss. Haven't felt a nee…

Is it about scalability, or about resiliency ?

Or is it about outsourcing problems?

There's a lot of off the shelf microservices that can solve difficult problems for me. Like keycloak for user management. Isn't that a good reason?

Or Grafana for log visualization?

Should I build that into the monolith too? Or should I just skip it?

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#274

Post by scuff3d »

A problem not addressed by the article is customer expectations. If you work for a company that does contracting, you have to deal with customers who have enough knowledge to know all the buzz words but not enough knowledge to actually know what they're asking for. If you don't give them Kubernetes and micro services they don't want to pay you.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#275

Post by yibg »

sgarland wrote: post #47
BirAdam wrote: post #29

Just to be honest for a bit here... we also should be asking what kind of scale? Quite a while ago, before containers were a thing at all, I did systems for some very large porn companies. They were doing streaming video at scale before most, and the only other people working on video at that scale were Youtube. The general setup for the largest players in that space was haproxy in front of nginx in front of several…

THANK YOU. People look at me like I’m insane when I tell them that their overly-complicated pipeline could be easily handled by a couple of beefy servers. Or at best, they’ll argue that “this way, they don’t have to manage infrastructure.” Except you do - you absolutely do. It’s just been partially abstracted away, and some parts like OS maintenance are handled (not that that was ever the difficult part of managing s…

I think it depends on what you are optimizing for. If you are a VC funded startup trying to get to product market fit, spending a bit more on say AWS probably makes sense so you can be “agile”. The opportunity cost there might outweigh infrastructure cost. If you are bootstrapped and cost matters a lot, then different story.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#276

Post by worldsayshi »

CaptainOfCoit wrote: post #7
radarsat1 wrote: post #2

> scalability needs a whole bunch of complexity I am not sure this is true. Complexity is a function of architecture. Scalability can be achieved by abstraction, it doesn't necessarily imply highly coupled architecture, in fact scalability benefits from decoupling as much as possible, which effectively reduces complexity. If you have a simple job to do that fits in an AWS Lambda, why not deploy it that way, scalabili…

> It's of course great to have a modular architecture, but whether or not they run in the same process should be an implementation detail It should be, but I think "microservices" somehow screwed up that. Many developers think "modular architecture == separate services communicating via HTTP/network that can be swapped", failing to realize you can do exactly what you're talking about. It doesn't really matter what th…

> network seems to be the default barrier when it doesn't have to be.

But if you want to use off the shelf solutions to your problems it often is. You can't very well do 'from keycloak import login_page'.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#277

Post by yoyohello13 »

vidarh wrote: post #267
yoyohello13 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked on a project for my company (a low volume basic web app) and I suggested we could just start the whole thing on one server. They brought on some Azure consultants and the project ballooned out to months of work and all kinds of services. I’m convinced most of the consultants were just piling on services so they could make more money.

It's probably true. The biggest challenge with doing the right thing in this space is that the sales job is hard, time consuming and so expensive that it's a lot easier to make it profitable if you make projects balloon like that. The sales effort is much the same. I've been offering to help people cut costs for a while, and it's a shockingly hard sell even with offers of guarantees, so we're deemphasizing it to focu…

I don't necessarily even blame the contractors. When the bosses look askance at simple solutions what can you do? It's weirdly harder to sell people on something simple than on something complex. They assume the simple solution must be missing something important.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#278

Post by daxfohl »

hedora wrote: post #138
bpicolo wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The moment you are thinking of a job in terms of "fits in an AWS Lambda" you are automatically stuck with "Use S3 to store the results" and "use a queue to manage the jobs" decisions. I think the most important one you get is that inputs/outputs must always be < 6mb in size. It makes sense as a limitation for Lambda's scalability, but you will definitely dread it the moment a 6.1mb use case makes sense for your app…

The counterargument to this point is also incredibly weak: It forces you to have clean interfaces to your functions, and to think about where the application state lives, and how it's passed around inside your application. That's equivalent to paying attention in software engineering 101. If you can't get those things right on one machine, you're going to be in world of hurt dealing with something like lambda.

I'd say the real advantage is that if you need to change it you don't have to deploy your monolith. Of course, the relative benefit of that is situationally dependent, but I was recently burned by a team that built a new replication handler we needed into their monolith, and every time it had a bug, and the monolith only got deployed once a week. I begged them to put it into a lambda but every week was "we'll get it right next week", for months. So it does happen.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#279

Post by worldsayshi »

acron0 wrote: post #4

Ugh, there is just something so satisfying about developer cynicism. It gives me that warm, fuzzy feeling. I basically agree with most of what the author is saying here, and I think that my feeling is that most developers are at least aware that they should resist technical self-pleasure in pursuit of making sure the business/product they're attached to is actually performing. Are there really people out there who st…

I don't buy the idea that people mainly reach for microservices for scalability or "pleasure" reasons though.

I personally reach for it to outsource some problems by using off the shelf solutions. I don't want to reinvent the wheel. And if everyone else is doing it in a certain way I want to do it in the same way to try to stand on the shoulders of giants and not reinvent everything.

But that's probably the wrong approach then...

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#280

Post by 9dev »

vidarh wrote: post #254
jkaplowitz wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or at least you have to automatically destroy and recreate all nodes / VMs / similar every N days, so that nobody can pretend that any truly unavoidable hand-edits during emergency situations will persist. Possibly also control access to the ability to do hand edits behind a break-glass feature that also notifies executives or schedules a postmortem meeting about why it was necessary to do that.

I know of at least one organisation that'd automatically wipe every instance on (ssh-)user logout, so you could log in to debug, but nothing you did would persist at all . I quite like that idea, though sometimes being able to e.g. delay the wipe for up to X hours might be slightly easier to deal with for genuinely critical emergency fixes. But, yes, gating it behind notifications would also be great.

That sounds like the kind of thing that’s amazing, until it isn’t and you know exactly why your day just got a lot worse.
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